The subject matter disclosed herein generally relates to flight control systems for a rotary wing aircraft, and more particularly, to an integrated target and flight control system for an aircraft where pitch attitude and heading are controlled independently from vehicle trajectory.
Conventional rotary wing aircraft provide a unique orientation for a given configuration, weight, center of gravity, atmosphere, and speed. As a result, there is a single pitch attitude and bank angle required to sustain the trimmed, unaccelerated flight. A change in the aircraft attitude will cause the vehicle to accelerate in one or more directions. This can make it difficult to point the aircraft at a desired target or point of interest. To work around some of the limitations of the aircraft, more complicated systems, such as FLIR, sensor turrets, turreted weapons, and synthetic vision solutions are often utilized which increase complexity, cost, and weight.
Targeting systems, such as an integrated fire control and flight control (IFFC) systems, are often used to coordinate an aircraft's flight attitude with that required for accurate launching or firing of the aircraft's weapons. These integrated systems typically embody both an automated flight control function, which controls the aircraft's response in its yaw, pitch, roll and collective axes to the sensed state of the aircraft's flight dynamics, to provide stable aircraft response to pilot commanded maneuvers, as well as a fire control function which modifies the flight control commands under certain circumstances to provide optimum aircraft-to-target orientation for weapon launch. However, as a result of the automated flight control function, a pilot temporarily cedes some of their control over the aircraft trajectory to the automated systems when these systems are enabled. Since the original vehicle trajectory is altered by the flight control system prioritizing aircraft orientation for weapons release or aiming, the fire control function cannot be maintained indefinitely.